"Breeding-back" aims to restore or immitate extinct animals by selective breeding. This blog provides general information, the facts behind myths and news from various projects.

Monday, 10 June 2013

The surviving capacity of horses and cattle

It is a
common misconception that domestic animals lost much of their capability of
surviving without man. Because of that, some people might conclude that breeding-back
should not emphasize the appearance of the animals but their surviving capacity
instead, otherwise the result is a population that looks like an extinct animal
but cannot survive in nature. But, as we painfully have learned, domestic animals
of any species, be it dogs, cats, sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, donkeys, horses,
camels or rabbits successfully survived and adapted to a life outside man’s
custody. Abandoned or escaped pets/livestock flourished not only in the native
range of their respective species, but also in ecosystems their ancestors never
inhabited. Let’s focus on cattle and horses because they are the relevant
species here.

Feral
horses

There is a
number of free-roaming horse populations in North America, such as mustangs,
the Sable island pony, Chincoteague pony, Cumberland island horse, Nokota, the feral
horses in British Columbia and a few more. The mustang is even legally
protected. Most people might be familiar with the fact that these free-ranging
horses descend from Iberian horses that have been introduced into the Americas
during the last few centuries. The largest population of feral horses is found
in Australia, where they are called Brumby and number up to 400.000
individuals. Brumbies prefer grassland with rich water sources while feral Australian
donkeys tend live in arid savannas [1] – they show the habitat preferences of
their ancestors.

Feral Chincoteague horse

Brumbies in Australia

Some
pacific islands are home to feral horses as well. On the Japanese island Kyushu there is the Misaki-uma, a pony that dwells
mountain regions. New Zealand is inhabited by the Kaimanawa horse.

Misaki-uma in the Japanese upland

The most unexpected and
unknown place for feral horses is Africa. Yet there are indeed free-roaming
populations in the Kondudo (Ethiopia) and the Namib Desert. They seem to be
related to Arab horses [2].

All these populations I
mentioned above (and this list isn’t meant to be complete) are outside the
range of their wildtype, and the environmental factors in some of these regions
are drastically different from those of their species’ native range. Now let’s
move to feral horses of Europe.

Britain
once was inhabited by feral pony populations that were the base for many of the
native British pony breeds. The Exmoor Pony is the last remnant of these feral
horses (the earliest historic reference dates back to 1036) that now largely
lives a domestic or a semi-feral life. Britain is home to several other
semi-feral pony populations, such as the Dartmoor Pony, New Forest Pony or
feral Welsh Ponies.

Feral Garrano in Portugal

Some
Iberian horses are similar to these British ponies and are considered members
of the “celtic pony type”. The Garrano is such a breed and lives feral in
northern Portugal. Moving eastwards, we have the Marismeno horse, found in the Doñana National Park, and the Camargue horse. The
Netherlands are inhabited Europe’s second largest feral pony population, as
about 1000 Koniks live in Oostvaardersplassen without major human interference.
Central Europe does not have a true feral horse population today, but until the
1840 there was a feral breed called the Emscherbrücher (its remaining
individuals were integrated into the Dülmen Pony stock). The Letea forest in
the Danube Delta in Romania is inhabited by the Danube Delta horse. During the
last years, this feral population flourished and now they are Europe’s largest
feral horse population counting about 3600 individuals.

Interestingly,
I realized that many feral horses have a brown/bay coat colour, but that
doesn’t have to mean much.

Feral
cattle

Just like in
the case of horses, there are feral cattle on nearly each part of the world. In
North America, you have feral Texas longhorn in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife
Refuge, and feral herds of Florida Cracker live in the Paynes Prairie. On
Sapelo Island (Georgia) and Kauai (Hawaii) the descendants of abandoned dairy
cattle still live there.

Feral Corriente on Kauai

Australia is home to the
so-called Shrub oxen which are used for commercial hunting, just like their
relatives on New Zealand.

On
Amsterdam Island, an island in the south of the Indian Ocean, feral cattle have
been running around since 1871 and their number grew to more than 2000. They
descended from usual French dairy cattle such as Tarentaise or Jersiaise and
have developed a remarkable “wild” body shape. There are feral herds on the
Seychelles and the Falkland Islands as well.

Feral cattle on Amsterdam Island

It
shouldn’t be all too surprising that there are feral cattle in Europe as well. The
longest history as a feral breed has Chillingham cattle. The earliest written
account is from 1645, they suffered from severe inbreeding during the last
century.

In Southern
Europe, there are feral herds of the aurochs-like Maronesa breed, and
semi-feral herds of Monstrenca in the Doñana National
Park as well as semi-feral Camargue cattle. The Betizu breed is native to the
Pyrenees and is very shy because it has been hunted for a long time [3].
Nowadays there is a reserve in Navarre to preserve that breed. And of course,
there are the more than 500 Heck cattle living with little human interference
in Oostvaardersplassen.

Feral Betizu bull (Image source: Wikipedia)

To put it in a
nutshell, cattle and horses apparently do not have any big difficulties in
surviving in nature – many of these feral populations descend from usual dairy cattle
or riding and working horses that one wouldn’t expect to come across in the
wild. They survive because domestic animals have not been pampered by a life
exclusively in sheds and masses of food for millennia as you might imagine. In
fact, one could say that natural selection still played a role in the origin of
many domestic animals that we know today, because the economic situation of
farmers often made it impossible to protect their animals to the largest
possible extent. In less industrialised regions of Europe there still are
less-productive forms of agriculture where the horses and cattle mostly have to
take care of themselves and only get supplementary food on some occasions. The
harsh conditions livestock has to cope with creates so-called landraces that
are adapted to their home range. It wasn’t all too long ago when this form of
breeding livestock was common the developed countries of Europe and North
America as well. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that a lot of breeds are
capable of surviving without human interference. Some certainly do better than
others, and some highly-derived and inbreed breeds might not be capable of
doing so, but the majority of cattle and horses apparently is.

What does this all tell
us about breeding-back? It teaches us that phenotypic aspects do not have to be
neglected because of concerns on the surviving capacity of the animals as long
they are healthy and genetically diverse, especially since breeding-back
attempts mostly work with landraces.

11 comments:

The following two pages of Wikipedia have lots of interesting informations!The page of Wikipedia about the Genus Equus:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equus_(genus)The page of Wikipedia about the Bovinae:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovinae

About this blog

This blog is on everything related to the so-called “breeding-back” of extinct animals: From the extinct animals themselves, over their often domestic descendants and dedomestication to news and facts about various breeding-back projects, reports and photos from my own breeding-back related trips. I try to have a balanced and fact-based approach to this subject and to dismantle many of the popular myths. Enjoy!

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About me

My major interest always have been extinct animals, from dinosaurs to Pleistocene megafauna and more recent extinctions. Besides that I am interested in evolution, genetics and ecology.
I am also an amateur animal artist, making drawings and models mostly of extinct animals.